Today's digital media have opened the door to an information marketplace where although it enables a greater degree of flexibility in digital content distribution and possibly at a lower cost, the commerce of digital information raises potential copyright issues. Such issues can become increasingly important due to the highly increasing amount of audio distribution channels, including radio stations, Internet radio, file download and exchange facilities, and also due to new audio technologies and compression algorithms, such as MP3 encoding and various streaming audio formats. Further, with tools to “rip” or digitize music from a compact disc so readily available, the ease of content copying and distribution has made it increasingly difficult for content owners, artists, labels, publishers and distributors, to maintain control of and be compensated for their copyrighted properties. For example, for content owners, it is important to know where their digital content (e.g., music) is played, and consequently, if royalties are due to them.
Accordingly, in the field of audio content identification, it is desirable to know, in addition to an identity of audio content, precisely how long an excerpt of an audio recording is, as embedded within another audio recording that is being broadcast. For example, performing rights organizations (PRO) collect performing rights royalties on behalf of their members, composers and music publishers when licensable recordings are played on the radio, television, and movies, and the amount of the royalties is typically based upon an actual length of the recording played. The PRO may then distribute these royalties to its members, minus the PRO's administration costs.
The music industry is exploring methods to manage and monetize the distribution of music. Some solutions today rely on a file name for organizing content, but because there is no file-naming standard and file names can be so easily edited, this approach may not work very well. Another solution may be the ability to identify audio content by examining properties of the audio, whether it is stored, downloadable, streamed or broadcast, and to identify other aspects of the audio broadcast.